Weekend Watch: Will ‘The Discovery’ Mess With Your Head?

Director Charlie McDowell’s directorial debut, the 2014 film The One I Love, messed with your head. It was the story of a couple, played by Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss, who follow their therapist’s advice and take a weekend at a vacation home, only to discover that the guest cottage is housing a pair of their doppelgangers. It sets the stage for a tense, funny, and deeply bizarre relationship dramady, and you should go watch it today.

McDowell’s follow-up film, The Discovery, debuted on Netflix today, and it’s also got a premise that’ll knock you on your ass: in the near future, a scientist named Thomas Harbor (Robert Redford) has discovered “overwhelming proof” of the existence of an afterlife. Nobody knows exactly what it is, just that it is. And merely by knowing that, people all over the world are committing suicide in record numbers. At the same time, Harbor’s son Will (Jason Segel) meets a woman named Isla (Rooney Mara), who wants to know more about Harbor’s research.

It’s a thorny moral situation; Will is a skeptic of his father’s work and stares with a wary eye at the cult that is building up around him. He’s alarmed by the suicides and sees them as a leap into something that is still very much an unknown. Are we talking another plane of existence? A new start? That’s what Harbor is trying to find out. Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to die and come back, over and over.

One disappointing thing about The Discovery is that while the idea of examining how proof of an afterlife with affect practical society is a compelling one, the dying-and-then-coming-back thing has been done before. Flatliners was a long time ago. There’s an excellent one-sentence premise here, it’s just that the execution doesn’t live up to it. The other disappointing thing is that Segel and Mara are not nearly as compelling as the film needs them to be. We’ve seen in movies like The End of the Tour that Segel can be successful even outside of the bro-comedy niche he came up in. But his character here is so downbeat that Segel’s charms barely register. Meanwhile, downbeat is where Mara lives, but without anything to bounce off of, she just kind of mumbles. It doesn’t help that their meet cute on an island ferry rips off Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind so shamelessly.

McDowell is a talented filmmaker. He makes the most of the misty environs he sets the film in, keeping the walls between this life and the next as ephemeral as possible. And there’s a sequence between Redford and Riley Keough where he’s at his cultiest that truly disturbs. But in the end, the narrative itself doesn’t have enough forward thrust to keep its delicate existential notion of a premise from dissipating.